


Rather a Widow than a Bride

by CorvidFeathers



Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Forced Marriage, Friendship, Gen, Mostly hurt, everything is pain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-08
Updated: 2016-02-08
Packaged: 2018-05-19 01:09:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5950474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorvidFeathers/pseuds/CorvidFeathers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peggy Shippen breaks down.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rather a Widow than a Bride

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like this fic needs a few disclaimers/warning, as I'm sort of unsure how to tag it.  
> I tried to portray her and Arnold's relationship as it is on the show, which is... uncomfortable and not really consensual on her part. So this fic contains oblique references to rape and sexual violence. The circumstances of their relationship are... sort of weird, since he doesn't entirely know the pressure she is under, and the pressure isn't all from him, but... he still is really forceful and manipulative. So.  
> I also want to make it REALLY clear that in no way at all is this supposed to be a representation of the historical people's relationship; I don't know enough about either of them to write that. This is just based off the characters in Turn and how they are portrayed there.  
> That being said... I love Turn!Peggy and she Deserves Better.

A man might treat courtship flippantly, as a game, but for a woman the stakes were very real.

How flippantly she had said that, before.

That was the thought on Peggy Shippen’s mind as she sat in her father’s parlor, listening to her friends chatter.  It should have been a perfect morning- would have been a perfect morning, if it had happened but a few weeks before.  The morning sun was shining through the parlor window, illuminating the room in cheerful hues.  The table was arrayed with cards, interspersed with china plates laden with little cakes and teacups.  Her closest confidantes were all in attendance, waging a war of clever remarks.

On a perfect morning, Peggy would have sprung into their battle of wits with equal verve.  But today, she merely shuffled her cards listlessly and let their words flow over her, not really paying particular attention to either of the games that were being played.

A woman’s future, at least the future of a women like her, depended on who she let possess her.  A married woman lost any autonomy she might have enjoyed; she became a wife first, beholden legally and socially to her husband in everything.  Marry the wrong man, and a woman would lose every shred of autonomy she had.

Peggy had quipped about it with John, but she had not truly understand the full terror of it.  Not viscerally, as she did now.  

She felt as if she were a too-clever fox, who had stumbled into a trap while it ran rings around its hunters.  She was trapped, and wounded, and sometimes the urge to run felt so strong it was maddening.  But there was nowhere to run.  

“- but our Peggy, of course, would know something about that.  After all, she’s soon to become Mrs. Benedict Arnold, is she not?” Becky, the younger of the two, crowed.  This was, apparently, a crowning achievement in their argument.  All three of her friends turned to her, expecting Peggy to shoot a blithe remark back.

She blinked, and then smiled and shuffled her cards with a little laugh, forcing herself to display the gaiety that had once been such an easy part of her personality.  “Forgive me, my friends.  My mind wandered.”

Freddy chuckled.  “Our lovebird is already yearning for her nest,” he said.  “We’ve done her wrong by dragging her away from it.”

“Peggy!  You know well you shouldn’t be nesting yet,” Becky, the younger one, said, a wicked sparkle in her eye.  “It’s a season or more until you’re wed.”

Peggy’s smile was hollow, but she could lie in a parlor just as well as John could act on stage, and none of her friends noticed.

“The point,” Becky, the older one, said.  “Was that Fred claims that marriage is an institution that brings joy to no one- while I say it is quite good at bringing joy, just not for every sort of person.”  She exchanged a meaningful look with the younger Becky, and they both giggled.

“Since our dear Peggy is the only one with experience, she must decide the argument,” the younger Becky said, twisting a lock of hair between her fingers.  Again, they looked at her expectedly.

Her friends.  Her dear friends, who would likely never know the terror of being trapped as she was.  Becky was an established spinster; all attempts to amend that state by her family had fallen flat.  The younger Becky was a fourth or fifth daughter, Peggy could never remember, and several of her sisters had already married well, and drained enough of their family’s coffers with their dowries that her father was unwilling to push all of his daughters into unions.  And Freddy- well, he was a man, and a servant.  He had no overbearing parents pushing him to climb social ladders for them, and he had all the power to say no to any suitor that wasn’t to his taste.

Peggy loved her friends for their stubbornness, their oddities, and most of all their freedom.  They were free- and Peggy had done everything she could to lengthen her own freedom, until she could find someone to whom union would be freedom and not a noose and an albatross.

And she had found him.  And lost him.

The silence had stretched on too long.  Peggy had no clever words.  She laughed, the sound desperate even to her ears.  “I… think marriage is wonderful, for some.  A unity of souls, and a practical partnership.”  She smiled.  “But it’s a tool that can be used too easily to wound; to tie those together who are unsuited to each other.  That’s… far too common.”  She trailed off, picking up her cards again and shuffling through them.

Becky smiled wickedly.  “So I win!  And thus, Peggy marrying a Continental general becomes worth it.”

“You’re just jealous,” the younger Becky said with a roll of her eyes.

“Jealous?  I’m jealous,” Freddy said.  “All the powerful men that swoon over Peggy… it’s enough to make any man jealous.”

The night before, Arnold had come to her room and she had done her wifely duties.  She still felt unclean.  It wasn’t the first time she had been used for another’s entertainment, for no real regard for her, but before, she had been able to bear it because she could outwit every one of them, and escape with her reputation and her freedom intact.

Now, she was to marry this man.  This man who held her so tightly when he kissed her he left bruises on her arms, who stormed and swore when he didn’t get his way, who struck out like a viper when his pride was insulted.  A man who saw insults everywhere.  A petty, cruel, vindictive man.

He was everything John was not.

“When is the date, Peggy?” Becky, the younger one, asked.

It was wrong, it was all wrong.  She was going to charm Arnold and soothe his pride with promises of the glory and riches he could find in the King’s service, tress him and leave him rip for John to ensnare.  Then John would end the war, once and for all, and be a hero for it- a man that her father could not scoff and belittle, a man who could marry Margaret Shippen without the need for secrecy.

“Soon, I hope,” she heard herself say.  “So I can be a widow as quickly as possible.”

It had been asking for too much.  She should have persuaded him, she should have contented herself with eloping, with running away together.  The thought had been intoxicating then, and it was infuriatingly irresistible now; it stuck in the back of her mind like an itch, the knowledge that she could be in John’s arms now, far away from Philadelphia, if only…

She wanted to take John by the shoulders and shake him, tell him that hoping for a quick end to the conflict had been hopelessly naive, that pinning his happiness on it was not a gamble he wanted to take.  She wanted to go back and tell herself that, encourage that younger, brighter Peggy of just a few months before to take the hand of her handsome suitor and run, and leave all the rest of it behind.

But that opportunity was past.  She was soon to be Mrs. Benedict Arnold, and then she would be yoked to the loathsome man for the rest of her life.  

“How likely do you think it is, for a general to die in battle?” Peggy asked, interrupting whoever was reacting in shock to her statement.  

Perhaps he would die.  Perhaps Benedict Arnold would die with the rest of the rebels, and John could ride in and sweep her away.  

They all stared at her, expressions mixed between concern and uncertainty.  At last Becky, the older one, reached out and patted her arm.

“Not likely at all, my dear.  Especially a man like yours.”

No.  It was more likely to be John who died.  She had hardly been able to make herself read the reports from Monmouth, as Arnold strode around, alternatively cursing Charles Lee and praising the slight Continental victory.  He had been so caught up in his own opinions that he hadn’t noticed how she had paled to see Major John Andre’s name in the reports, luckily for her.

“A pity,” she said.  The words were small and bitter in her mouth.  “I should to be a widow as quickly as possible, I think.”  Not too quickly.  Not too quickly.  She had to turn Arnold.

“Peggy, dear?” the voice came too her as if through a thick fog.  She barely registered the familiar room, or the familiar faces staring at her with three identical expressions of shock.

There was no salvaging this.  How had the words escaped?  She was so tired of staying silent, bowing to the wishes of her father, her family, Arnold… finally they had managed to collar their free-spirited daughter.  Her father was so pleased, even if she was marrying a general of even less mean than John.  His daughter would finally be settled, and he would not have to worry.

“I told you.  I should like to be a widow as soon as possible,” she said, fiddling with her cards.

“Peggy!” Becky, the older one exclaimed.  “That’s… quite a thing to say.”  It was a testament to their friendship that she did not condemn the sentiment immediately.  Instead, she looked at Peggy with eyes wide with concern.

“He cares nothing for me,” she said with a bright smile.  His kisses were crushing, like he was staking claim to territory, as if he could win her heart with brute force.  Everything else was… well.  She didn’t want to think of it, not now.  “He wants me because he feels he is lacking, and having possession of the most beautiful woman in the colonies soothes his pride.”

The parlor was silent for a moment, as her friends considered this claim.

“Peggy,” Freddy said at last, leaning forward to touch her arm.  “Are… you alright?”

She had no answer to that, so she gave none.

“We had no idea,” Becky, the younger one, said.  “We’d thought you- well- we didn’t think it was a marriage your father would have arranged if you hadn’t wanted it, given… the General’s situation.”

“You’d been acting strange in the months leading up to your engagement,” Becky, the older one, added.  “You seemed… brighter, when we saw you, and we hardly ever did!  You spent half your time at the soldiers’ theater.”

Peggy bit her lip.  The familiar ache of tears was building in her throat, and she blinked, trying to keep them at bay, to no avail.  They escaped, trickling down her cheeks.

“I was in love,” she confessed.  “But it… it doesn’t matter now.”  She tried to smile.  “I’m marrying General Arnold.  We must make do with the hand we’ve been dealt, mustn’t we?”

“Who was it?” Becky, the younger one, asked.  The older Becky leaned closer to Peggy, and put her arm around her shoulders.

“You don’t have to tell us,” Freddy said quickly, but the look in his eyes told her he already suspected.

“M-Major André,” Peggy sniffled.  No degree of decorum could hold back her tears any longer.  She buried her face in Becky’s shoulder and cried, in the most undignified manner.  

Her friends cooed and fussed over her, clearing away the cards and taking her up to her bed.  They turned away inquiries from her father and General Arnold, saying she was ill and not in a state for company, and tried to turn her mind to other things, anything aside from the fact she was soon to be married to a man she hated.

It did not fix the situation, but it let her forget, for a little while.

Peggy did not let any more of her relationship with John slip- let them think it was just a passion of a few dances and snatched conversations after plays, because there was nothing more harmless.

She still had a job to do, after all.


End file.
